Concerning your discussion regarding the Ki Society basic principles, I think you would be better having a face-to-face with a Ki Society instructor. My own instructor read Tohei's description of unbendable arm. Then he would go around trying it out (unsuccessfully) on everyone he knew. After he was shown how to do unbendable arm and other ki principles, he realized that you can't just read things in a book and expect to do it correctly.

If you're interested, there are listings for both Colorado and Connecticut at Ki Society USA. I don't know if these places are easy to get to for you. However I think you could see more clearly from experiencing instruction at a dojo, rather than making assumptions from what you've read.

Ki and Chi are the same Chinese characters. But K. Tohei uses his own axioms that are different than traditional Chinese or Japanese concepts. There are also differences between writers in the Chinese and Japanese tradition, as well as differences between writers in each tradition. Ki/Chi is a concept that could go back to the Stone Age, so there are many different ideas about it. To assume that everyone is writing/talking about the "same" thing is not exact.

Hi Ted:

Well, I appreciate the pointers.

I guess I'll just accept your opinion of things and mention in the friendliest of intentions that I've been to a few Ki Society dojo's in the past and I haven't seen any of them that I thought knew much about Ki. Besides, the demonstrable aspects of Ki come from what the Japanese learned from the Chinese and the Chinese, in turn, apparently got their substantive Ki practices from early Indian Buddhist monks.... but those practices don't go back to the Stone Age, I'm afraid. It's more like a "body technology" that was developed in India some time ago.

The Japanese Ki practices and the Chinese Qi practices (bear in mind there are a lot of variants, but the basic principles are the same.... they have to be) differ only in sophistication. But, I'm not trying to convince you. When I was taking Aikido, I was fairly frustrated by the dearth of real information and I wished someone would give me some clearer directions on how to actually start. In a sense, these few posts I'm going to make on some Aiki forums are only to refresh my memory of what's going on in the Aikido world and to mention a few things that I wish I had known 20-30 years ago.... i.e., I'm talking to the few people who are intellectually curious and I honestly expect only very few people to pay attention.